Maxwell Street Foundation

The Maxwell Street Foundation emerged from the Maxwell Street Historic Preservation Coalition that Lori Grove and other neighborhood advocates organized in 1993 to contest UIC’s South Campus expansion. When the city declined to designate the remaining market corridor as a Chicago Landmark, the coalition pivoted to documentation: it commissioned an architectural survey of surviving commercial buildings, petitioned the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, and filed both state and federal lawsuits. A federal Section 106 settlement required the university to photograph every building in the corridor before demolition.

The Foundation now holds the coalition’s organizational papers and operates as a public archive and advocacy organization for the market’s history. Its online holdings include photographs from the 1890s through the 1990s, oral histories with Jewish, African-American, and Mexican-American vendors and residents, and documentation of the Canal Street market relocation that followed the 1994 to 2001 demolitions. The Foundation interprets the Maxwell Street record as an active tool for communities facing institutional expansion, not only as a memorial.

The Foundation’s ongoing work supports researchers, filmmakers, and organizers who draw on the Maxwell Street case to understand the limits of historic preservation law against a clearance that a public university and the city controlled simultaneously.